Wednesday, October 07, 2020

Not So Good At Secreting

From a recent Chicago Tribune comes this.

As a young law student, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett lived in a house owned by co-founders of People of Praise, a religious community that teaches that men are divinely ordained as the “heads” of both family and faith.

Barrett has not publicly discussed her role with the secretive organization founded in South Bend, Indiana, which some former members have alleged subjugates women.

From the super-secretive People of Praise website's Who We Are page comes this. 

Our community life is characterized by deep and lasting friendships. We share our lives together often in small groups and in larger prayer meetings. We read Scripture together. We share meals together. We attend each other's baptisms and weddings and funerals. We support each other financially and materially and spiritually. We strive to live our daily lives in our families, workplaces and cities in harmony with God and with all people.

Man, that's some first-class journalisming right there. PoP is so secretive they have a website with an About Us page and contact information. There's no way to expect anyone to find out more about them with all those layers of subterfuge.

Note: PoP sounds almost identical to the Catholic movement I joined, Cursillo.

From the looks of the polls, the side that tells easily-disproved lies about a Catholic movement, applauds poisoning children with hormone blockers, is fine with babies dying of exposure if they survive an abortion and takes nuns to the Supreme Court to force them to buy contraceptives is going to win, possibly very bigly.

I'm not worried, though. All my social justice Catholic friends are excited about it, so it's got to be fine.

3 comments:

tim eisele said...

Well, first off, I agree with you that People of Praise is hardly "secretive". "Ignored by the general public" is probably more like it. If they are doing things that no one outside the group knows about, it is because no one is looking, not because PoP is intentionally keeping secrets.

Still, the presence of a web site and a "who we are" page doesn't necessarily make an organization non-secretive. I mean, the National Security Agency (https://www.nsa.gov/what-we-do/) and the CIA (https://www.cia.gov/about-cia) both have pretty detailed "who we are and what we do" pages. But I think we are all aware that both of those organizations have a lot of secret activities that they keep thoroughly under wraps, and that they obviously don't mention on the website. In my mind, this definitely qualifies them as "secretive", even though they've got public web pages.

K T Cat said...

Dude, these guys are practically clones of Cursillo. Come to one of our parties at my place and then you can complete your comparison with NSA and CIA.

:-)

IlĂ­on said...

=="From a recent Chicago Tribune comes this.As a young law student, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett lived in a house owned by co-founders of People of Praise, a religious community that teaches that men are divinely ordained as the “heads” of both family and faith.Barrett has not publicly discussed her role with the secretive organization founded in South Bend, Indiana,"==

'People of Praise' is a "respectable" and Catholic version of the Pentecostalism in which I was reared.

By the way, 'People of Praise' is so secretive that, as a high-school student, I -- a very down-market Protestant -- worked as a janitor in the Catholic school in which they held their meetings (and I always got to clean up afterward). My only complaint with them was wishing that they were a bit neater.